


Living like there's nothing left to lose

by ziparumpazoo



Category: Fringe
Genre: Comfort Sex, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Reunions, post 5.08
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-23
Updated: 2013-01-23
Packaged: 2017-11-26 15:32:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,114
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/651845
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ziparumpazoo/pseuds/ziparumpazoo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>hold on and take a breath, I'll be here every step</p>
            </blockquote>





	Living like there's nothing left to lose

The evening's drizzle has turned into a full-fledged downpour by the time Olivia finally gets Peter home. 

_Home_ being the operative word. 

She doesn't remember when home stopped being the house on Quincy, or her apartment in the months they were together before that. Once upon a fleeting time, home was the Bishop house in Cambridge with its high ceilings and stained-glass windows that bent the light just so and made the mornings feel long and golden. 

Etta's place is a way station full of ghosts. 

No, home has always been the lab, capitalized in her mind in big block letters with drop shadows hanging over its heavy wooden doors. It's where they always ended up. It's where they always went to regroup.

Olivia leaves him in the tunnel while she goes to find Walter and tells him Peter's back. The amber refracts the even the smallest amount of light and casts everything in subdued shadows. She packs a few things into a backpack – soap, towels, clean gauze and tape – while Walter follows her around asking questions she doesn't have the answers to yet. She stops him from following her back into the air vent with a firm hand on his arm and a promise that she won't let Peter go again. The yellow light deepens his worry-lines to crevices; amber is brittle and unforgiving.

The lab may be home, but it offers little privacy; Walter's more prone to insomniac wandering than ever and Astrid's sleeps but a portable curtain away. Peter hadn't been sleeping when he'd been there at all. 

She hands him the Observer tech, wrapped in cloth and wiped free of Peter's blood, and tells him, "Please, Walter. I need my husband right now more than you need your son," and when his gaze drops to the bundle cradled in his hands, "just for a little while."

"Of course," Walter tells her. He forces out a smile that wavers then disappears. It's a delicate balance they keep; a dance of fathers and sons, husbands and wives, daughters and fathers turnabout. Of needing and being needed. And needing to be needed. Their relationships are always adjusting and ever-changing. She's played second string to him before and she's certain she will again quite soon for Walter to be able to see the plan through, but for the moment he'll cede the stage. "I suppose I don't need to remind you to be careful."

Olivia searches his eyes for hints of a deeper meaning and is reminded that in this timeline she was like a child to him long before Peter came back to fill that role. "Of course," she echoes gently.

 

The steam tunnels under Harvard have turned out to be a godsend. They use them as their own railroad, ferrying supplies in and out of the lab under the noses of the Loyalist guards; carting cots and bedding from student residence storage rooms, munitions from Resistance sources, and themselves under the cover of night.

Olivia leads Peter by the hand down one artery and up another branch to a heavy wooden door in the basement of Grays Hall, deep in the heart of Observer territory. Silver light filters through the few un-shuttered ground-level windows. The shadows feel cold and unwelcoming. They weave their way between stacks of wooden chairs and dusty boxes of text books and drop-cloth covered shapes that could be anything from dining hall dishes to treasured artifacts spirited and away at the start of the Purge. Down the hallway, and through a heavy door to the old showers.

Peter dogs the door behind them with a chair jammed under the handle, while Olivia checks the window; they move as quietly as they can, but their footsteps still echo against the tile walls and floor.

"You're hurt," Peter says as he pulls her under the shaft of moonlight that cuts a sharp swath through the middle of the room. It's the most he's said since she'd coaxed him down off that roof.

She tries to duck her head and tries to give him an, "It's nothing, I'm fine," but he catches her chin with his fingertips, gentle as he's always been, and there's no point hiding it; she aches, inside and out and in places she's terrified are now out of his reach. "You're soaking wet," she counters as he tilts her face this way and that, taking in the damages.

"So're you."

His voice has lost that mechanical edge; his movements are becoming more fluid. She may just have gotten through to him in time. 

Olivia unzips his jacket and strips his shirt. She pulls the collar over his head and brushes his neck. Her fingers come away tacky. "We need to get that cleaned up properly."

They can't risk running the taps, and the jugs of water they'd left stashed there are room temperature at best, but it's better than nothing. Olivia shucks her own wet clothes into a pile in the corner until she's down to damp shirtsleeves and underwear. She's never felt shy in front of Peter, never had anything to hide from him before, but it's fair to say there's still a part of her that's spooked by what he'd become. There's a part of her that's afraid that the distance and the grief between them might yet be too far to bridge.

Peter watches her as he digs through the backpack for supplies with one hand; the other he keeps fisted around their daughter's necklace, bullet clutched like a talisman. 

"Sit," she orders once she's divested him of his boots and his jeans, and leads him to the chair by the door. Peter doesn't argue. He leans forward when she threads her fingers through his hair, rests his forehead against her stomach and tightens his fingers into her hips when hers get too close to the angry gash at the base of his skull. It's already starting to mend. She dabs at the wound with clean gauze and tries not to pull back when he hisses and his hands dig into the bruises on her ribs.

He feels her tense. "'Liv let me see." She nods and he pulls up the hem of her shirt. 

It looks worse in the half-light, she tells herself, but the truth is she's taken a beating or two before, and she can tell by the way it hurts to breathe deeply that she's going to be sore tomorrow.

Peter traces his fingers along her side with the edge of his thumb while he holds her steady with his other hand on her hip. He looks up at her and in the thin light she can see the worry written clear. "You want to tell me what happened?"

She shakes her head and brushes his hair back from his forehead. "Not now." 

He pulls her closer so she's standing between his knees. "Later, I promise," she tells him as his hands wander down the small of her back. She can feel the necklace kiss along her spine as he reaches under her shirt to pushes it up again. 

He touches his mouth to her skin, just below her ribs and moans something low and guttural as he inhales and breathes her in. The sound bounces off the walls and ripples down her body. She shivers and clutches at him because it's been _so_ long since they've touched like this and despite everything that's happened between them, all the time and all the space, Olivia has missed him. 

Peter skims his hands up, taking her shirt off and pauses, barely breathing. She stands almost naked in the moonlight and completely bare to him. He stares, but not at the bruises and scrapes this time, but at the much older scars that web her hips and her belly. Silver threads all the baby manuals promised would fade eventually. The ones she's been trying not to look at because it makes it too hard to forget that she too was a mother, once.

"I remember," he says thickly, "you used to look at these in the mirror and make faces when you thought I was looking.” He skims the pad of his thumb across them.

Olivia closes her eyes. He's lying on the bed, watching her dress and he's giving her a Cheshire cat grin. "You told me they were a badge of honor," she remembers as she reaches down and takes his hand. "Now when I see them, I can't stop thinking about her." His fist is still clenched around the chain. 

"You're lucky," he tells her. "She'll always be a part of you."

Olivia turns his hand upwards and peels his fingers open. She takes the chain and slips it over his head. The bullet rests in the middle of his chest, over his heart. Her fingers hesitate over it, conferring a blessing before she drags them up to his face.

He leans in as she pulls him to her and his shoulders hitch. "She's a part of you too, Peter," she wraps her arms around him and whispers into his hair as she sinks down onto his lap. "She always will be." 

The chair is hard and the floor is slick under the balls of her bare feet. She shifts to settle herself more firmly, hips pressed into his, chests and bellies flat together. Peter clings to her like she's his lifeline and his body responds to the subtle change in position. The familiar pressure of him between her thighs sends a thrill through her and her pulse speeds up. She didn't drag him all this way for sex – her intention had been solely to give him space to recoup - but they'd had four _good_ years together before it all fell apart and her body remembers his in ways the rest of her had been afraid she'd forget. 

The sound her throat makes as his hands find their way to her hips is something between a moan and a sigh. It reverberates off the walls around them and Peter's sharp intake of breath as she moves against him echoes back. His lithe magician's fingers slip her bra-clasp loose; a twitch of her shoulders and it falls to the floor. His mouth finds the sensitive spot at the juncture of her jaw and her throat and his hands skim her panties aside as easily as if the last time had been the day before, not twenty years and change. 

He says something that might be her name or it might be _please_. Or maybe both, but it's muffled against her skin and all she knows is that her body is answering _yes, take whatever you need_.

But some higher part of her brain kicks over and throws up a flag. She pulls back, panting, and cups his cheeks in her palms and tilts his face toward the cold light until she can see for certain that his eyes are clear and free and that yes, this is all Peter. Broken and bent and hurting, but her Peter just the same. She touches her mouth to his forehead, his nose, his lips. 

Her back curls outward and her stomach bunches as she bends to kiss his chin, his throat, then his chest. And when she drifts too far - when the air between them picks up the room's chill - he pulls her so she settles back onto him with a sigh that starts somewhere deep in her chest. 

It feels like coming home. 

Peter holds her fast with an arm around her waist and his palm threaded through her hair at the crown of her head as if even though he's both inside and wrapped around her, he's afraid of what will happen if he lets her go. They move together, a stuttering rhythm at first, until they've picked out all the unforgotten notes. Their breathing echoes harshly against the tiles and the chair squeaks and groans. Peter's arm around her ribs tightens against her bruises when he gives in. It breaks her concentration enough that she follows him, riding out the aftershocks as she breathes heavily against his shoulder. 

Eventually, his head falls back against the door with a soft thud as his breathing slows. Olivia touches his cheek and isn't surprised to find her fingers wet. She brings her hand away from his neck, and she's not surprised that her fingers are red.

"Still hurt?" She brushes her knuckles along the side of his brow.

His forehead wrinkles and he looks as spent as she feels, but he shakes his head _no_. "Not as much." 

He's not healed, but he's better than she could have hoped; he's come home too.

**Author's Note:**

> Title and summary shamelessly stolen from Lifehouse's _Between the Raindrops_ :
> 
>  
> 
> _The world's such a crazy place_  
>  _When the walls come down_  
>  _You'll know I'm here to stay_  
>  _There's nothing I would change_  
>  _Knowing that together everything that's in our way_  
>  _We're better than alright_


End file.
